Edward Said states, “A beginning is what I think scholarship should see itself as, for in that light scholarship or criticism revitalizes itself...[A] beginning methodologically unites a practical need with a theory, an intention with a method” (Beginnings 380). In this sense, he argues that “‘beginning’ is an eminently renewable subject” (380). This paper explores the various “beginnings” in Kuwait’s educational evolution. First, I examine two features commonly identified as the historical beginning of formal education in Kuwait: the 1936 Education Council and the Palestinian mission. The Palestinian teachers that arrived to teach in Kuwait by way of this mission contributed several additions to the curriculum, including what may be described as Kuwait’s earliest form of citizenship education: courses on civility and morality (Shahab). In the following decades, Palestinians played a significant role in the content and quality of Kuwait’s educational system, as this paper will demonstrate. In the 1970s and 80s, however, government policies limited the number of Palestinian teachers in state schools. “Kuwaitization” halved the number of Palestinian teachers by the mid-70s while tripling the number of Kuwaiti teachers (Lesch). After 1991, Palestinian teachers who had continued to teach during the Iraqi occupation faced Kuwaiti resentment; Egyptian teachers were recruited to replace Palestinians as a form of “collective punishment” (Lesch 50). These decades comprise what I term the beginning of the end: the second, often repressed “beginning” in Kuwait’s educational evolution. As Said points out, “Even when it is repressed, the beginning is always a first step from which...something follows” (xvi). What has followed in Kuwait’s educational system is yet another—not to say “new” or “better”— “beginning.” This current “beginning” is a project uncomfortably shared between the government and Islamists in parliament, both of whom seek control. It is characterized by a static nationalism and a pervasive Islamic orientation within the curriculum, and is carried through mainly by Kuwaiti teachers. This paper will present data from curriculum and policy analysis as well as open-ended interviews with Palestinian and Kuwaiti teachers and students in order to explore Kuwait’s three identified “beginnings” and the presence and absence of the Palestinians within each. Particular attention will be paid to Palestinian contributions in the fields of secular and citizenship education. These will then be contrasted with the highly nationalistic and religious education system prevalent today, highlighting the loss of the “intentions” and “methods” of that promising “beginning” in the 1930s.